In the kingdom of treasure hunters, the Merchant Royal is king. Nicknamed the "Eldorado of the Seas", this ship sank on September 23, 1641 near the British coast, off the Scilly Islands. On board were some 100,000 pounds of gold, 400 bars of silver and hundreds of thousands of coins. The current value of the cargo is estimated at more than one billion.
The Merchant Royal, merchant ship
Before ending up on the bottom of the sea, the Merchant Royal was a 700-ton galleon built at the Royal Naval Dockyard in Deptford in 1627. This important shipyard, founded by Henry VIII in 1513, was located on the Thames, near London.
With its captain, John Limbrey, the Merchant Royal took advantage of a few years of peace between England and Spain in the seventeenth century to trade with the Spanish colonies in South America and the Caribbean. After several years of fruitful trade, the ship set sail again for the old continent, loaded with precious metals.
A technical stopover in Cadiz
The Merchant Royal, after crossing the Atlantic, needed repairs. Unable to reach England directly, she stopped in Cadiz, in the south of Spain near Gibraltar, to repair a waterway.
During this stopover, a ship in Cadiz caught fire. Captain Limbrey offered to transport the cargo of the damaged ship, in addition to his own, to Flanders. It was the pay of some 30,000 Spanish soldiers based there, a fortune.
The disappearance of the Royal Merchant
After its technical stop, the Merchant Royal sailed back to England the last week of August 1641, accompanied by the Dover Merchant.
Alas, a month later, when approaching the English coast, the waterway, badly repaired in Cadiz, reappeared. The defective pumps could not cope. In bad weather conditions, the ship took on more and more water, so much so that she ended up sinking off the Scilly Isles.
Some of the crew, including Captain Limbrey, were rescued by the Dover Merchant, which was sailing with the Royal Merchant, but eighteen men perished. The cargo of the galleon sank with the ship.
The birth of a treasure
The gold of the New World, the Mexican silver, the coins, the pay of the Spaniards, the precious objects, all this sank with the Merchant Royal to the bottom of the water. This booty represents one of the greatest maritime treasures in the world.
Many treasure hunters have set out on the trail of the Merchant Royal. In 2007, the American company Odyssey Marine Exploration thought they had found the ship after discovering, off the coast of Cornwall, a wreck containing about 17 tons of gold and silver coins. It was actually a nineteenth century Spanish frigate, the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes.
In 2019, a Cornish fisherman brought in his nets a huge, centuries-old anchor. It could be from the Merchant Royal. The treasure hunt is still going on...
